This is wonderful news, and my sincere thanks to the author.
I remember coming upon this algorithm several years ago, and thinking it was extremely elegant and very appealing, but being disappointed by the patent status making it unusable for FOSS work. I really appreciate the author's choice to dedicate it to the public domain after a reasonable amount of time, and congratulations on the success it had while proprietary!
Now if I ever get around to writing that terminal emulator for fun, I'll be tempted to do it with this algorithm for the code's aesthetic appeal.
> I was granted a patent for the Slug algorithm in 2019, and I legally have exclusive rights to it until the year 2038. But I think that’s too long. The patent has already served its purpose well, and I believe that holding on to it any longer benefits nobody. Therefore, effective today, I am permanently and irrevocably dedicating the Slug patent to the public domain.
I am sorta in a position where implementing a glyph renderer as a compute shader would be helpful. This is a great opportunity to use this as a reference... exciting weekend project!
Oh wow this is crazy. This was a project that was reasonably successful commercially. And now it’s just being given away open source? What an absolutely incredibly gift to the community!!
Not quite, just the pixel/vertex shaders and the algorithm is public domain. Slug "the software package" is not open source (you can get a copy of it along with C4 Engine for $100 to take a peek if you want, though).
Now if I ever get around to writing that terminal emulator for fun, I'll be tempted to do it with this algorithm for the code's aesthetic appeal.
A Professional Equation Editor for Windows 10/11 for 60$ that uses Slug for rendering. Presumably he‘s using it to write his great FGED books.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260317185928/https://terathon....